Unpublished Plath sonnet goes online tomorrow

An unpublished sonnet by Sylvia Plath, apparently written by the author while she was in college, while pondering themes in F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, will be published for the first time tomorrow, in an online literary journal.

Anna Journey, a graduate student in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, claims that Plath wrote the sonnet, entitled 'Ennui', in 1955 during her senior year at Smith College. Journey discovered the sonnet while conducting research in the Plath archives at Indiana University.

The poem will be featured in Blackbird, an online arts and literature journal published by VCU's English department and New Virginia Review. In her personal copy of Fitzgerald's book, Journey said, Plath wrote the phrase "L'ennui" - boredom - next to a passage in which Jay Gatsby's love interest, Daisy Buchanan, complains that "I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."

"She was observing; her notes were creative, metaphorical reactions," Journey said. "She was riffing off of Fitzgerald's passages." The poem - two original typed scripts with some of Plath's handwritten notes - apparently contains the same themes as those Plath jotted in her Fitzgerald book, including the thwarted romanticism of Gatsby, the naive knight, and the futility of idealized fairy-tale roles.

The 14-line Petrarchan sonnet opens:

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe, designing futures where nothing will occur.

According to Gregory Donovan, a VCU English professor and Blackbird co-editor, the poem constitutes further evidence of how hard Plath worked at her craft at a young age. "That's what made it possible to write such amazing poems later in life," he said. "Poets don't just come out of an overwhelming emotional experience. They come out of study and hard work."

Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life and professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, believes there could still exist other early, unpublished works by the prolific writer. When Plath's widower, the poet Ted Hughes, put together a collection of her poetry in 1981, "he didn't pay much attention to her earlier poems."

But what makes the discovery of any unpublished Plath poem noteworthy, Wagner-Martin claims, is the groundbreaking expression of humour and anger by a female writer, and her works' lasting impact. "These were not voices you would hear in the 60s in women writers," she said.